Phoenix and Ashes (53 page)

Which
explained why she was dressed like one.

Now,
her own pride would have kept her hidden from the village. And her stepmother
would never have admitted she had treated her own stepdaughter so shabbily. And
so the fiction of “Eleanor is at Oxford” was born, with both sides
of the situation eager to maintain it.

His
left hand clutched at the stone balustrade, and he downed the last of his drink
and set the glass down lest he inadvertently shatter it in his sudden fit of
anger. Perhaps it was absurd to be so angry over what was, essentially, a
teacup tragedy when there were so many greater tragedies in the wake of this
war. She wasn’t dead, after all, merely ill-used. She hadn’t been
struck by a stray bullet and paralyzed, not blown to pieces by a shell.

But
feelings, he reminded himself, were not rational. And this shabby treatment of
a girl who’d done nothing to earn it made him very, very angry.

He
could see how it was that no one noticed that she was still here, especially if
she herself took pains to conceal the fact. And no one ever really
looked
at anyone in servants’ clothing. Especially not someone dressed as
shabbily as Eleanor was. So on the rare occasions when she escaped her work for
a little, so long as she kept her head down—which everyone would expect
anyway out of a lower servant—no one would recognize her. He didn’t
recall that she had socialized much with the girls her age, anyway; it had been
the boys that had congregated around his aeroplane that knew her best, boys who
were all long gone in the first weeks of the War. Perhaps the adults—the
adult women, anyway—might have noticed, but in those first weeks and
months, they had more than enough cares of their own to preoccupy them. The
longer the charade went on, the less likely it would be that anyone would see
the face of the clever schoolgirl in the visage of the work-hardened young
woman. That had to be it.

The
question now was—what could he do about it? And to that question he had
no ready answer. For a start, how could he even get to her to talk to her?
Helping her would mean prying her out of her imprisoning shell, the walls of
The Arrows, and at the moment, he had no good idea of how to do that.

Once
he did that, he also had no good idea of how to offer help without it seeming
like charity and pity, and he had a fairly good idea of what she would think
about charity and pity. At least, he thought he did.

“Penny
for your thoughts,” the Brigadier said, out of the darkness, startling
him from his concentration.

“I’d
have to give you ha’pence change, Brigadier,” he replied,
mendaciously. “I wasn’t thinking about much.”

The
old man chuckled. “Let’s go in, then,” he suggested.
“The damp isn’t doing either of us any good.”

“Probably
not,” he agreed. “I was thinking of going down to the village,
anyway.”

“And
I’m for my book and bed,” the Brigadier replied. “It’s
peaceful out here. I shall take my rest while I can get it.”

They
parted company on the terrace, Reggie limping his way down to the stable to get
his motorcar. He decided that he would see what he could learn by steering the
conversation in The Broom around to the Robinsons. It would be natural enough,
what with The Arrows being almost directly across the street, and that would be
a good place to start.

July 22, 1917
Broom, Warwickshire

Sarah looked so
triumphant when Eleanor arrived just before midnight that Eleanor could not in
good conscience deny her the pleasure of revealing whatever it was that had put
that smug smile on her face. She hoped it was good news, because today had been
particularly brutal. The amount of work that she’d been laden with would
have laid her out four years ago. She’d almost been too tired to come here
tonight, and really, all that had gotten her out the door was the promise of
eventual freedom.

“It
is a very good thing that no one would ever entrust you with a state secret,
because you could never conceal the fact that you
had
a secret in the
first place,” she told her mentor, as she picked up her mother’s
notebook to begin her exercises, took a deep breath, and concentrated on
getting her second wind. She and Sarah were focusing on one thing now; to
extend the length of her “leash,” so that she could attend the fancy-dress
ball—though how she was going to get inside the doors of the manor at
Longacre Park without an invitation, she had no notion. There was no chance
that one would come for her now. Lauralee, Carolyn, and Alison had long since
gotten theirs, and the girls took every chance they could get to take out the
precious piece of cream-laid vellum and flourish it about. Their
acquaintances—one could hardly call them “friends,”
anymore—in the village were eaten up with envy. The only other villagers
who had gotten invitations were the vicar and his wife, and the doctor and his.
With this alone, Alison had made it wordlessly clear how much higher her social
stature was in the tiny circle of Broom. That, in fact, she had escaped the
social circle of Broom for another, more rarified atmosphere.

She
had, of course, cleverly feigned confusion to “discover” that no
one else had achieved similar invitations, and unlike her daughters (who might
be excused such behavior on the grounds of their callow youth) she did
not
make much of it after that initial flurry of exquisitely acted discomfiture. In
this way, even though she had without doubt made some real enemies among the
village elite, none of them would dare come out actively and openly against
her. The ladies still came to her teas and her war-effort
gatherings—though with all of the invitations up to the manor, those were
becoming infrequent. But she presided over them with the absent air of a queen
who has other concerns than the petty ones of her subjects.

Eleanor
had hoped that somehow, someone would remember her existence and include her in
the joint invitation, but no one had; it had read, “Mrs.Alison Robinson,
Miss Danbridge, and Miss Carolyn Danbridge.” Not even a hint of
“Eleanor.” She had almost given up at that moment, but it did occur
to her that Sarah might know a way of slipping her in, somehow—or perhaps
even was planning to
forge
an invitation. Granted she wouldn’t
be on the guest list, but perhaps no one would check that, or if they did, she
could claim she was part of “Alison Robinson and daughters.” Or
perhaps Sarah meant for her to slip in through the gardens, though how she was
to do that in an enormous ballgown eluded her.

She
settled herself at Sarah’s old, age-darkened kitchen table, her brazier in
front of her, a Salamander already lying coiled in the coals without needing to
be summoned.

“Here
you are, just as I promised,” Sarah said, handing over a plain envelope
that contained a cream-laid vellum one that—no mistake—was
identical to the one in Alison’s middle desk-drawer. The outer one was
addressed to Sarah, but the inner to Eleanor herself—At an Oxford
address. Somerville College, to be exact. She gazed at it in blank
astonishment. She already knew what it contained, of course. Her invitation to
the ball. But—“How—” was all she could manage.

Sarah
actually winked. “I have my ways,” she said. “A little word
to—someone—who kindly reminded her ladyship that Miss Robinson was
away at Oxford as the invitations were picked up to be given to the postman, so
she rewrote the Robinson invitations on the spot. And then, a—fellow
follower of the Ancient Ways, not an Elemental Master, who is—” She
hesitated. “Well, I’ll only say this. She has every reason to be at
Somerville, and she chose Somerville because it is the women’s college
that has no religious requirements that might conflict with her own
faith.”

Eleanor
gaped at her, feeling her eyes going rounder with every passing moment.

“Oh,
don’t look at me like that!” Sarah laughed. “I told you there
were more of us than you’d ever guess! At any rate, she intercepted your
invitation and reposted it to me. That’s all. You are on the guest list
and you have a genuine invitation. So if I were you, I would stop staring and
get back to my exercises, or on the day, you won’t be able to get as far
as the front gate.” She plucked the invitation from Eleanor’s
nerveless fingers. “And I’ll keep that safe, here. No point in
risking having it found, and you’ll have to come to me to dress anyway.
Now, it’s time to work, not daydream.”

It
was difficult to concentrate on the tedious mechanics of a spell which amounted
to telling something very stupid and slow, over and over, that a boundary
wasn’t where it had been originally set. Doing so when your arms and
shoulders ached from all the fetching and carrying you’d done, and your
legs from all the trips up and down the stairs, was even harder. Magic, she had
come to understand, was largely a means by which the magician imposed her will
on the world, and made the world conform to it.

That
sounded very simple, and in theory, it was—or would be, if there was a
simple world to deal with, and only one magician in it.

The
problem was that there were a great many other things, a few of them also magical
in nature, that were also imposing
their
will on the world. Ways had
to be found to get the results one wanted with the least interference with
everything else. Some interference was inevitable; meddling with things made
ripples, and disturbed other things.

It
wasn’t just that one didn’t want to disrupt other things that were
going on out of courtesy—or fear of reprisal. It was that when one did
interfere unduly, there were consequences. Everything one did magically had a
cascading effect, like the little pebble that starts an avalanche. Sometimes,
of course, one could stop the cascade before things became serious, but you had
to be
aware
of consequences to do that. You had to look for the things
you might change, and include them in your plan. You had to try and think of
things that weren’t obvious.

Consequences…
and responsibilities. That called to mind the purview of the High Priest. The
Magician. Most of all, the Hermit, who moved slowly and only after studying all
the possible ramifications of his actions.

One
of those ramifications was that when things were jarred into new patterns,
there were sometimes—Things—that took notice; different creatures
for each Element. The ones for Earth were the Trolls and Giants, for Fire, the
Wyverns and Fire-drakes (entirely different species than true Dragons). For
Water it was the Leviathans, and for Air the Wendigo. They were not very
bright, but they were very powerful, very dangerous, and always, always hungry.
What they “ate” was the life-force of magicians. One did not want
to attract their notice. Even Alison moved cautiously to avoid attracting
Trolls and Giants.

So
the smaller one’s “footprint” of influence was, the better.

Alison
had gotten away with as much use of magic as she had because she had confined
it mostly to one single person—Eleanor. Hedging one person in with spells
did not make much of an effect on the rest of the world.

Now
it was Eleanor’s turn, and the best course of action now seemed to be to
work on the spells already in existence. That meant, at the moment, persuading
the spell that kept pulling her back to the hearth that it had never been meant
to call her back when she went beyond the grounds of The Arrows—that
instead its boundary was much farther. It would return to its previous state when
she took her attention off it, of course, but that didn’t happen at once,
and in fact, the more she worked at this, the longer she had before it
reverted.

The
village was very quiet at this time of night. A dog barked out in the distance,
and nearer at hand, the trees rustled as a breeze tumbled among their leaves.
Inside there was only the pop and crackle of the small fire in the fireplace,
and the sound of their breathing.

“I
think
,” Sarah said, when she had been working at her
spellcasting for the better part of an hour, “that if we could just find
a way to dig up your finger and destroy it, that would break the spell.”

Eleanor
slowly released the spell she had been manipulating; she could see it in her
head, like a cat’s cradle of lines of magical power. It remained as she
had left it, and she turned her attention to Sarah, who was watching her with
solemn eyes. They’d had this discussion before. “But you’re
still not sure,” Eleanor said flatly. She looked across the table into
Sarah’s eyes, and saw what she expected to see. Once again, Sarah had
attempted to unravel the complexities of the spells around Eleanor, and once
again, she had not been able to decipher them.

Sarah
shook her head. “I’m not powerful enough to read all those spells
she’s tangled up around you. I just can’t keep them separate in my
mind. I think destroying the finger would break them all, but there’s a
chance that destroying the finger would make them bind more tightly.”

“I’m
not willing to take that risk,” she replied, with a frown. “If I
can achieve the Sun, that’s the card of freedom and problems solved, and
it’s a Fire card. I’ll have the knowledge, the wisdom and the power
to use Justice’s sword, and I can cut myself free of the spell-bindings.”
She paused a moment, and added, “They say it’s a simple card. If I
can pass through it soon…”

She
didn’t specify what she meant by “soon.” She had eight more
cards to pass through before she reached the Sun. She had yet to face
Death… or even the Hanged Man. Truth to be told she didn’t want to
face either, but it had to be done. The Hermit had not been as frightening or
as difficult as she had thought, but the Wheel of Fortune had been terrifying.
One wouldn’t think that an abstract concept like that would be
frightening, but—